Easy Does It While Making Air-Bag Explosive Moses Lake Firm Takes Precautions Against Accidental Detonation

Takata Moses Lake Inc. makes things that blow up. That’s one reason it sits isolated on 375 acres.

Its product is the explosive cartridge that inflates the air bag in a car. The cartridge must be able to sit safely for years in a steering wheel, and on electronic command fill the bag in 50 milliseconds. If a car is in a fire but not a crash, a backup detonator inflates the bag so the cartridge doesn’t turn into a grenade.

Manufacturing the explosive propellant is a delicate business, says Chief Operating Officer Jim Burtelow. Workers stay behind a concrete wall - parts of it 3-1/2 feet thick - using video cameras and sensors. The walls are part of a five-sided cube, with a thin sixth side facing away from the workers and toward special barriers of wood. Twice the mixture has exploded, both times in 1993.

“Nobody was even scratched,” Burtelow says.

Takata, a privately held company based in Tokyo, manufactures seat belts and air bags at factories in Asia, Europe and North America. It set up the Moses Lake operation in 1992 after it had worked on the technology there with Olin Aerospace of Redmond. Takata invested $80 million in Moses Lake, and employs 375 people making 2 tons of propellant and 8,000 cartridges per day.

Takata claims about 10 percent of the air-bag market, selling mainly to Japanese automakers. Its Moses Lake plant exports 45 percent of its output, mainly to Asia, and will be exporting to Germany in the next six months, Burtelow says.

The United States created the air-bag industry through regulation in 1990, by requiring passive restraints for car drivers; in 1993, for drivers of sport utility vehicles and light trucks; in 1994, for front-seat passengers in cars; and by 1998, for front-seat passengers in trucks. Europe and Asia have left these safety decisions more to the market, but demand for air bags is rising quickly, especially on expensive cars.

Takata began at Moses Lake by building passenger-side cartridges. These look like pipe bombs and are filled with sodium azide, a chemical toxic to handlers. “We have to take a lot of precautions,” Burtelow says.

Last year, Moses Lake began production of driver’s-side cartridges with a new explosive that’s nontoxic and more environmentally friendly, Burtelow says.

It is also more powerful, which allows the cartridge to be as small as an English muffin. “The stylists for the auto companies can now do more with the steering wheel,” he says.

Burtelow hopes his next products will be passenger-side cartridges with the new propellant, and perhaps a cartridge for a side-impact air bag. The company has no customer for a side-impact cartridge, but its cigar-sized prototypes are now being evaluated by car companies.

“This is probably the next big wave,” Burtelow says.

Production at Moses Lake could double in the next five years, though “the labor may stay the same,” he says.

The plant’s future depends on where Takata decides to accommodate growth. Labor rates in Moses Lake are higher than at plants in the South, Burtelow says, but direct labor is only 5 percent of the company’s costs. Perhaps more important is that many of the plant’s suppliers, such as high-volume manufacturers of metal products, are thousands of miles away.